Responsive/Adaptive Web Design

I haven’t posted anything to my blog in way too long of a time, but all I can say is, being a new Poppa can be all consuming. There’s good and bad to that… but mostly good as far as I can see. :-) Anyway, I’ve been excited by the possibilities I’ve been seeing with “Responsive Web Design” for well over a year now, and figured I’d post a little something about it.

The Basics

Previously, if clients were concerned about how their site was viewed on mobile devices, firms would build separate device-specific sites for the more popular devices for their users. Typically the iPhone, for the clients that could worry about and pay for the extra design and development.

So, “Responsive Web Design” is basically creating CSS for your HTML pages that listens to what sort of environment the end-user is using to view the page, and serves up typography, graphics and layout that is best for that environment. What do I mean by “environment”? Well, it’s the difference between viewing a site on your maximized 1600×1200 desktop browser, 1024×768 laptop, or maybe viewing the site from your iPhone oriented vertically. Those are some very different environments, and can be treated differently to make for a better viewing experience for your end user in any of those viewing environments.

And he even created an example website that had pretty good cross-browser adaptability even for May of 2010. It can be viewed here:alistapart.com/d/responsive-web-design/ex/ex-site-flexible.html
(If you are on a non-mobile device, try resizing the browser, and watch the page completely respond to your changing environment. If you are on a mobile device, you can rotate the orientation of the device to see 2 potentially different layouts.)

If you’ve ever been tasked to make a beautiful and usable website for a client, and then asked as an after-thought to make an iPhone version of the site, this new methodology can be amazingly exciting.